


if my true love she were gone

by khlassique



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Season 4 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 14:08:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12655083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khlassique/pseuds/khlassique
Summary: this is 100% what i'd wanted to happen in s4, but, alas, canon. not like it's going to stop me from publishing this tho. originally posted this on my tumblr, mixed it with another snippet i wrote a few months ago, et voilá."blooming heather", as we know it, wasn't published until the mid 20th century, adapted from a song published first in 1822. however, this is also my fic, so who cares.





	if my true love she were gone

**Author's Note:**

> this is 100% what i'd wanted to happen in s4, but, alas, canon. not like it's going to stop me from publishing this tho. originally posted this on my tumblr, mixed it with another snippet i wrote a few months ago, et voilá.
> 
> "blooming heather", as we know it, wasn't published until the mid 20th century, adapted from a song published first in 1822. however, this is also my fic, so who cares.

_Oh the summertime is coming_

_And the trees are sweetly blooming_

_And the wild mountain thyme_

_All around the blooming heather–_

The words came not as prettily as they would have if she’d had company, as Anna twisted the straw and corn into a little doll. They didn’t even have corn in Scotland, she thought, or at least, not enough to spare for dolls.

_Will ye go, Lassie go?_

Scotland caught in her heart, the tune one she learned from Hewlett, as he’d play it on the harpsichord and warble at her sweetly. Others in the camp had sung with a full brogue, men and wives not far removed from their ancestral land, defecting to a new one all the same. It made Anna’s heart stutter, all of this love for an infant nation. 

She thinks of a country she has never seen, an image in her mind of twins- a boy and a girl with dark hair and serious eyes and wide mouths, on little sturdy ponies. The ponies are in the summer woods outside Setauket, dappled sunlight on their flanks.

In the years of her marriage with Selah, Anna had accepted that she may never have children, wrestling with whether this conclusion was one to fill her with dread or freedom. Selah wanted them- sons to take the tavern, a daughter to dote on- and they tried very often to make this dream true. Their children would have been serious in all manners, Anna knows, and she cannot point to when her husband had become so serious, when they had all become dour from the fight.

_And we’ll all go together_

_To pluck wild mountain thyme_

_All around the blooming heather–_

Hewlett- Edmund- had shown her sketches of mountain thyme, of heather in bloom, of the muscles of men without skin and stars in motion. So many ideas on paper, so many ideas in words, the air teeming with possibility to the point she felt herself shivering from it. Hewlett had kissed her once, when she was so, in the dark of the Whitehall library, calling her  _my darling, my dearest, my brilliant constellation_ , and she’d responded in kind to her astronomer. If she were stars, he were the telescope to seek her out. 

_Will ye go, Lassie go?_

And yet. Here she was, a camp follower, the corn in hand and her voice unsteady. A camp, a cage, a marriage- these things all the same, closing in until too late, the lock latched and keys upon their hook.

It was for the best, she tries to tell herself at night, the broken promises and the broken men and the broken-

_I will build my love a tower_

_Near yon’ pure crystal fountain–_

Broken broken broken broken, her mind spits, stuck as a wheel in a muddy rut. The wreckage of her heart.

She had gone into the love that time a disillusioned woman, wary as an unbacked colt, duplicitous and genuine, spy and civilian. Edmund had not deserved what she'd done, none of them had ever deserved it, but that was life, wasn’t it? At least she was not drummed out of camp, bitter and raging. In that there was freedom.

_And on it I will build_

_All the flowers of the mountain–_

Another voice, to match hers, one she knows, or at least she knew in a time of war, for do you ever know an enemy, at the tent entrance–

_Will ye go, Lassie go?_

And so Anna turns-

And there he is, her astronomer, her betrothed, her broken heart, cloak and weariness draped 'round his shoulders, but were they all not weary-

The song dies.

It has been a long war, love, and when he says, oh yes, she realizes she has spoken the words aloud, hands stilled with distraction. The pull of him is irresistible as the moon, but she doesn’t know that she, too, is irresistible, in this way. 

But Edmund feels this gravity, and goes to her, and so it is that they once again fit forehead upon forehead and nose against nose, his palm fitted along her jaw, her hand upon his neck. The astronomer and his constellation fit into the tent, the camp, the nation– but oh, did love not require the universe?

_And we’ll all go together_

_To pluck wild mountain thyme_ _  
_

_All around the blooming heather  
_

_Will ye go, Lassie go?_


End file.
